Newly Discovered Adware Can Slip A Trojan Into Mac OS X

There was a time when Apple used to pride itself in the fact that its mobile and desktop platforms are absolutely invulnerable to malware or outside attacks. With time, that stance took a few strides in the opposite direction as we started to hear about different vulnerabilities in Apple’s software. Today, we have a newly discovered adware at hand, which can potentially open the floodgates to Trojans on a Mac.

Originally discovered by folks over at Dr Web, the adware – named Adware.Mac.WeDownload.1 – when launched, asks a user for administrator privileges to install Adobe Flash Player onto a Mac. And of course, when you allow that to happen, you’re giving away a whole bunch of device control to an unknown, ill-intentioned individual.

The adware, once launched and granted administrator privileges will in turn install malware and different types of Trojan originating from the Trojan Conduit family. In other words, once all the bad stuff makes its way onto your Mac, you can rest assured that you’re compromised for good and your personal data along with other details will end up on a remote server.

At this point in time, the vulnerability remains unpatched of course. But given Apple’s track record when it comes to such things, we’re pretty certain that the Cupertino tech giant will work its magic and push out a point update to patch the whole thing. When will that happen is anyone’s guess at this point, but we’re somewhat certain that the fix might be a part of the upcoming OS X 10.11.1 update, which will make its way onto Macs around the world once OS X 10.11 El Capitan sees its release on the 30th of September. Till then, the only thing to do is try your level best to remain safe online and not download anything from shady sources at all. Most of the time, users unknowingly download an app and launch it without any sort of knowledge while also granting it administrator privileges in the process. While those clicks sound absolutely harmless, but we all know what that can lead to.

We aren’t out of the whole XcodeGhost fiasco on iOS and now we’ve come across this. Given how things stand at this point, we’re sure hackers aren’t going to rest easy at all, and will try their level best to break right into Apple’s strict security protocols.

It’s time to put yourself behind the firewall people, you never know what might happen!